Google’s ‘Heart Murmur’ Reminds Us How Dependent We Are

Yesterday, all of Google’s services went dark for several minutes. So far no one has stepped forward to explain what exactly caused the outage, but there’s one thing we know for sure: we’re really dependent on Google.

Think about it, most of us traded in our hotmail accounts for Google’s iteration years ago. The search engine that started it all links to millions of websites around the world. And Android smart phones (which uses an operating system built by Google) are arguably one of the most purchased devices. See where I’m going here? What would happen if something catastrophic went down at Google HQ?

Based on the numbers, 40% of the entire worlds network traffic was silenced. That’s a decent slice out of any pie chart. Imagine the damage if Google’s services were to be offline days or weeks! The thought of an empire of that size is quite humbling. The interwebs would be quite different if Google’s exit was quick and not expected.

Needless to say, I believe having accounts with different internet moguls is the best way to stay out of the fog, if it’s to happen again.

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I least only googles front end services were affected. Email was still flowing inbound and data-connected apps (eg: android’s gmail sync) didn’t seem to be affected in my experience. When there’s a Google outage is usually web services (thank goodness)!